Why the HTC Bliss is already annoying

This past December, a survey found that women weren’t as drawn to Android smartphones as men. Android’s answer to that? The HTC Bliss. The pale green smartphone will come with a stylish, matching cradle, an attached charm that lights up to indicate new messages or missed calls, and a matching Bluetooth headset. Cute.

The website This is My Next first picked up on the Bliss in May, saying it was being tested on focus groups of “women in their 20s and 30s.” PocketNow discovered what are reported to be images of the device, showing it off in all its chic glory, and an unnamed source for fan site YouHTC has spilled a few more details that line up with what we originally heard about the Bliss. Here’s a quick breakdown of the newly-revealed specs:

Available from Verizon

Qualcomm MSM7630 processor; 800 MHz

Adreno 205 GPU

Android 2.3.4 – Gingerbread

HTC Sense 3.5 interface

And just to review, This is My Next said an insider told them this about the phone:

About .54-inches thick

Rear-facing camera

Unique HTC Sense skin

From this brief outlook, the smartphone won’t be anything to write home about but has a few noteworthy qualities, like the upgraded HTC Sense interface (3.0 was just introduced). It probably won’t be very expensive, comparably, as well. But it’s what else HTC is throwing on the phone that ruins it for us.

The HTC Bliss will come jam-packed with lady features: Calorie counters, shopping comparisons, and from the sounds of it probably a few recipe apps in there too. It’s supposed to come in forest and sea green, because that’s a “calming” color–which is the same effect the exclusive Sense wallpaper will have–and is said to include something called a “female calendar.” And just to round out the clichés, the light-up charm notification gadget is connected to the phone via a wire that will reportedly make it easier to find the phone when rifling through a purse.

I would rather endlessly pick and pull through a purse (which is some women’s version of hell) than buy this phone.

It’s difficult to decide what’s more insulting: That HTC’s version of a woman is a calorie-obsessed, phone-losing, puddle of worry who needs a “calming” influence, or the fact that the Bliss is a mediocre phone at best. Instead of making a seriously powerful, fast, full-featured smartphone, the Bliss is outfitted with silly fluff.

There are conflicting stories about a front-facing camera (women take and upload more photos to social sites than men, and the mobile phone is often the camera du jour for these platforms), and if the hardware specs are right, it’s not going to be terribly powerful or boast blazing speeds. But it comes in green! It has an attached charm! Diet apps!

The way the Bliss is described makes it sound reminiscent of the ChaCha or the Status. Both of those phones, though, are marketed to youths, who generally don’t need particularly powerful phones or have the money to buy them. Maybe the Bliss is actually going to target girls between the ages of 15 and 20… but in that case a calorie counter would probably be considered inappropriate.